


Snapshots

by nevertheend



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-10 05:07:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11120520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevertheend/pseuds/nevertheend
Summary: Glimpses into the private life of PFC Merriell Shelton





	1. A Letter

Over the course of the entire war, Merriell Shelton received a single letter, and that was all. It was a letter from the state, announcing the death of his father. 

He was his father’s last living relative. Loïc, he remembered, had died shortly beforehand, and Mamma and Pierre went years ago. Alcoholism ran in the family. 

There was no will, and no inheritance. In the unlikely event that they should manage to sell the house, Shelton would take a cut of the tiny profit, but apart from that the bastard had left him nothing. 

“What’s the letter, Snafu?” They had asked. 

Snafu had merely popped a cigarette into his mouth and lit it, chin pointing defiantly towards the sun.

“It’s from his girl back home.” They had joked, whispered, and Snafu had just laid back on his basking rock, an alligator, with his fingers linked up behind his head, and smiled his razor sharp smile, and said nothing.


	2. Times Change, But History Repeats Itself

In truth, he didn’t have a girl back home.

 

He never really had.

 

There was that one pretty girl, he remembered, when he was very young, who wore green ribbons in her hair and always looked so clean, and she was kind to him. He remembered, she used to sit in front of him every day on the yellow school bus, and one morning she had turned around in her seat, eyes bright, and pulled back the collar of her anorak to reveal a wet live frog, shiny and brown and wriggling in her hands.

 

He had kissed her that day, around the back of the school in the wet grass.

 

For a short time, the two children were inseparable, but after a while the rest of the class begun to shun the girl for being his friend, and he found that although at first she said she didn’t care what they thought, she started talking to him less and less. She would still give him secret smiles sometimes, across the classroom and in the hallways, and his smile back would be over-bright, in an attempt to conceal his bitter disappointment.

 

Nobody had wanted to play with the creepy looking kid from the end of the street with the big eyes who was that bit skinnier, that bit dirtier than everyone else. The school was in a poor neighbourhood, but somehow the kids could sense that there was another, more disconcerting reason behind his family’s jutting collar bones and their hard, hard faces than there simply not being enough food on the dinner table.

 

So he would sit on the pavement alone outside his house and play by himself with a rock or an old shoe or a deflated tennis ball that had once rolled into his garden because he didn’t have any toys of his own. And in the school yard he would sit by himself on the wall and watch the other kids, and when one of them accidentally kicked their football out of the lines and came running up to where he was sat to claim it back he would pretend to look disinterested.

 

There had been another girl for a brief period of time in middle school, with whom he had gone out to get ice cream or a soda with a couple of times after class. He remembered how he had taken her down by the bayou, and how he had slipped his fingers inside of her on the ground underneath the cover of the swamp cypresses, and the cicadas had sung all around them.

 

By now these girls’ names had long since sifted out of his memory like sand but at least he had known them at the time, he thinks to himself, because by the time he was in his late teens he wasn’t even asking their names anymore.

 

No, he thought, the letter about his father now crumpled in his fist from how tight he had been holding on to it. Somewhere along the way, he realised, as he had gotten older and meaner, started staying out later and drinking more, he had forgotten how it felt that first time, down by the water in the tall grass with that girl, when he had become his own heartbeat.

 

By the time he was seventeen or so he was staying out all night, smoking and drinking and gambling with God knows who, fucking strange girls in fishnets and red lipstick in New Orleans back allies and coming home, just as the sun was coming up, to the sight of his weary mother sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee before she would leave for the morning shift. And as he ducked his head and mumbled, "morning' ma", ashamed to look at her as he traipsed past the open kitchen door to the stairway, she could only smile at him, full of sadness, because by God, didn't he look just like his daddy.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you have a request for me to write a certain memory or time in Snafu's life, leave it in the comments and I'll consider it :)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic will be a collection of memories from the life of PFC Merriell Shelton. All work is fiction, and based on the characters as portrayed in the HBO TV show, not real life individuals.


End file.
